This HOWTO brings the gentoo installation method (as in the Handbook) to Sabayon.

Please note that "an existing Linux system" can be either an installed system (then you cannot use that partition for sabayon), or a live linux system.

The first part is about installing a very basic gentoo system in a chrooted partition; in the second part we will use portage to install entropy and equo. We will then use equo to install a full sabayon system in the third and last part.

Configure environnment

Some early configuration

Set up a root password

As I regulary forget to setup the root password, let's do that as first thing:

passwd

Timezone

cd /etc/
ln -sf ../usr/share/zoneinfo/<REGION>/<City> localtime

Where <REGION> is your region and <City> the nearest big city.

Hostname

Be original and change "localhost" to something else. Update /etc/hosts accordingly.

nano -w /etc/conf.d/hostname
nano -w /etc/hosts

Mount points

nano -w /etc/fstab

Part 2: Sabayon overlay setup and installation of entropy+equo

Layman

layman is a gentoo tool to manage portage overlays. We will use it to get our hands on the sabayon overlay.

Update: entropy and equo are in regular portage, hence: skip this step.

# emerge --sync # make sure portage is fully up to date... or not. Up to you. portage snapshots are done daily, i see no need to sync.
# USE="git" emerge -avt layman # now equo is in regular portage!
# layman -a sabayon # see above

Entropy and Equo

emerge -avt equo --autounmask-write
etc-update
emerge -avt equo

Now we have entropy and equo installed. To make use of it, we should first generate the entropy database (only the very first time!):

equo rescue generate

Yes, you are sure about this. You should answer yes three times to make it happy.

Perfect. Now we need to setup sabayon repositories. As an example, we use sabayonlinux.org (i.e. updated daily), but you can use sabayon-weekly instead if you want to upgrade less often. See En:Entropy#Package_Repositories.